


I'm telling you, it's a love story

by StrictlyNoFrills



Category: Homeland
Genre: Bittersweet, F/M, I wrote this when I should have been working on my Polar fic, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Tag to Prisoners of War, post-season 8
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:22:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25383775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrictlyNoFrills/pseuds/StrictlyNoFrills
Summary: She spends the first six months resting and learning Russian, finishing her recovery from her first time as a captive of the GRU under the quiet, watchful eye of Yevgeny.
Relationships: Carrie Mathison/Yevgeny Gromov, Yevgeny Gromov/Carrie Mathison
Comments: 9
Kudos: 17





	I'm telling you, it's a love story

**Author's Note:**

> I finished watching season 8 yesterday and it left me with a whole host of Carrie/Yevgeny _feelings_. It was obvious from the beginning that he had some sort of op he was running, but it was equally obvious that he cared about her, and he made me _root for him_.
> 
> Title is actually a reference to a line from season 7, regarding Yevgeny and Simone.

She spends the first six months resting and learning Russian, finishing her recovery from her first time as a captive of the GRU under the quiet, watchful eye of Yevgeny. He ensures that she eats properly, sleeps a reasonable amount, and never misses a single pill.

“I’ve got this, you know,” she tells him one morning when he notes that she is still in her pajamas and casually (not casually, not truly, because nothing is ever casual with him) asks when she is planning to go for her daily jog. With a wry smile, she adds, “You don’t have to worry so much. I’m a big girl, Yevgeny. I can take care of myself.”

He eyes her with that fathomless look that says so much and nothing at all. “I do not mean to hover,” he says, which is as close as he will ever come to an apology, and which is a blatant but well-meaning lie, “but I think you forget, sometimes, that I know what happens when you are not cared for properly.”

She sends him a glare fiercer than any she has given him since they first got safe passage into Moscow. “Well then you’re wrong. I never forget that. Not for a single second. How can I?” Forget that he has seen her at her absolute worst? Forget that he knows some of the darkest truths of her soul?

His lips purse into a tight line as though she has wounded him somehow and he does not want her to know it, and then he smooths his face, fixes his suit jacket until it lays against his powerful, lean form perfectly, and strides over to press a kiss to her forehead. “Have a good day, Carrie.”

Their marriage ceremony is small and perfunctory – a protective measure, to secure her citizenship and to bind her indelibly to her new country and her permanent handler.

There is no coldness between them, aside from the multitude of secrets of their respective governments they can never share. Yevgeny, when he is not working, is gentle, attentive, and the embodiment of the proverb of still waters. He never once says that he loves her, but she knows it is not because he feels nothing. Yevgeny loves her too deeply, and she thinks it would break him a little if he ever had to hear the lie in her voice when she said it back.

It wouldn’t be a lie, coming from her lips, but it wouldn’t the whole truth, either. Under his steady care, Carrie comes to love him with a depth that surprises her, but it is marred by their origins. He is the one who took her captive, made her vulnerable, and then exploited her for the sake of his homeland, and while she can respect him for such a masterful use of his craft, she can never forgive him for it.

She finds the little bookstore on one of her jogs, six months into her new life, and she knows deep in her bones that it is time. She has mourned the way things could have been for long enough. It is time to go to work. She befriends Sascha, a pretty young clerk in the bookstore, and she begins the first draft of her book.

The first time she holds a copy of the book eighteen months later, sitting in her publisher’s office, she feels that old thrill in her heart. She thanks him and then takes her leave, making a brief detour to the ladies room. While there, she slips the note to Saul into the tiny space between the spine and then sets off to the bookstore, where Sascha is more than happy to mail the book for her.

Over the next few years, Carrie writes several more books – young adult novels inspired by Russian folk tales, and all centered around a pretty red-haired girl with big blue eyes, strong morals, and a stubborn set to her little rosebud mouth – and every single time, she sends an advanced copy, care of Sascha, to Saul.

Her niece graduates high school, and then college, and then joins the CIA. Carrie monitors all of this by tracking her sister’s social media profiles and hacking her email account. She should probably feel guilty about this breech of privacy, but aside from sending her niece and her daughter their own copies of her young adult books, it is the only contact she has with her family.

Her niece’s career in the CIA bears all the hallmarks of a young woman flourishing under Saul’s steady guidance.

Carrie is not at all surprised, then, when she attends Saul’s funeral – his real one, this time, after he died peacefully in his sleep, not a single Russian agent in sight – eleven years after her official defection from the US, and Josie approaches her with a book bearing Saul’s face on the cover.

“He told his publisher to release it posthumously,” Josie explains.

Carrie takes the book and then hugs her niece, privately marveling over the strong young woman Josie has become. Where has the time gone? Where is the impetuous youth who once wore this woman’s face? “How are you? How is Franny?”

Josie smiles. “I’m good. Franny is killing her junior year. She has a date for prom, which she’s pretty excited about, and she aced her SATs and ACTs.” She tilts her head and adds frankly but not unkindly, “She misses you.”

Carrie closes her eyes and feels a grief well up within her that is even deeper and more ravenous than her grief for Saul. If she lets it, this grief will swallow her whole. She takes a deep breath and shoves it away, even as she says, “I miss her, too. But I’m so proud of her. Will you tell her that? Will you tell her for me?”

“You could always tell her yourself,” Josie says.

She is shaking her head before the words are even fully out of Josie’s mouth. “If I see her, I won’t be able to leave, and I have to. My husband,” she ignores how foreign it still feels to refer to Yevgeny in such a way, even after all these years, “is away on a business trip right now, and I have to get back before he does.” She had managed to slip out of Moscow unnoticed, she was fairly certain, but if she was gone for more than seventy-two hours… Well. She needs to get back.

“Okay,” her niece sighs. “Okay. It’s good to see you, Aunt Carrie. I’m really glad you could come.”

“It’s good to see you, too.” She slips out of the synagogue, neatly avoiding any contact with Saul’s sister and her old coworkers from Langley, and then waits for her Uber driver to arrive. Thankfully, he is not chatty, and the trip to the airport is swift.

She does not sleep on the plane. She will not sleep until she has safely returned to Moscow, to the apartment she has shared with Yevgeny for the past eleven years.

No one tails her from the airport after her plane touches down, but she does not breathe a sigh of relief until she has shut and locked the apartment door behind her and performed a sweep of the apartment.

Nothing.

She makes herself take a long, hot shower before going into her office.

After, when her heart has slowed and her hands are steady, she sits down at her office desk. With a small pen light and a pair of tweezers, Carrie removes a thin slip of paper from the spine of Saul's autobiography. _Looking forward to working with you_ , Josie’s handwriting states _._ _The standard form of communication still applies_.

A few weeks later, Yevgeny walks through the front door and finds Carrie in the living room, her reading glasses perched on the edge of her nose as she works on the prologue for her latest book. She hits save and closes her laptop, setting it aside. Then she stands and allows Yevgeny to carefully remove her glasses and set them aside.

She draws him down into a kiss, running her thumbs along the edges of his greying beard and the lines that are beginning to settle into his aging face. “Welcome back,” she says.

He offers her the little half smile she knows so well. “Thank you.”

“I missed you,” she adds, and something warms in his dark gaze. He pulls her closer and rests his head atop her own.

“I missed you, too.”

Twenty-two years later, she makes a call. “It’s over,” she tells him, as the young Russian officer who finally found her out begins working to take down the barricade.

“What are you talking about, Carrie?” Yevgeny asks, startled in a way he rarely ever is. “What is over?”

“I have to go,” she says. “But I want you to know that I love you. That I have all along.”

“Carrie, what-“ But he knows. She can tell by the bleak tone of his voice that he has figured it out.

“Goodbye, Yevgeny,” she says before hanging up and raising the muzzle of the gun to her temple. She eyes the door as it trembles under the assault of several healthy, determined young bodies, and she smiles.

Sascha, who married a young GRU officer many years ago now, will be able to take Carrie’s place.

Josie is the director of the CIA, and Franny is a middle school English teacher who has three kids and on Fridays reads a chapter from one of Carrie’s many novels to her students.

She and Yevgeny have no children together. They both agreed it was for the best.

For three decades, she has been well loved and cared for, and she has protected her country from afar, honoring the work of Saul Berenson and Anna Pomerantseva.

She has no regrets.


End file.
